Recovering the Gospel from White Evangelicalism

I received my undergraduate degree from Moody Bible Institute. A small evangelical college in Chicago, MBI was founded by the evangelist Dwight L. Moody in the late nineteenth century and became a major player in the fundamentalist movement of the early twentieth century. Though the college no longer enjoys the outsize influence of its earlier years, it remains a well-regarded institution in evangelical Christian circles.

As a kid, I learned about the career of the great Dwight L. Moody, perhaps the most famous evangelist of the late nineteenth century. I suppose any self-respecting evangelical has at least heard of Moody. While at MBI, I learned more about the school's founder. He traveled around the country and across the Atlantic preaching to huge crowds. His commitment to the Gospel and passion for sharing his faith were legendary.

Dwight L. Moody, 1837-1899

But what I didn't learn about Moody is crucial to understanding White evangelicalism in our own time. I didn't learn that as Moody preached across the South in the 1880s there were Black churches boycotting his crusades. Moody held segregated meetings, emphasized reconciliation among Whites after the civil war, and told folksy stories associating African Americans with dirt and poverty to illustrate his sermons. He emphasized his respect for White southern ideals and did not discuss Black aspirations for freedom.

Black clergy protest segregated revival, Galveston, 1886.

One member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church wrote of Moody, "His conduct toward the Negroes during his southern tour has been shameless, and I would not have him preach in a bathroom, let alone a church." As southern Whites lynched African Americans and kept their body parts as souvenirs, Moody ventured South preaching that they could have their Christ and White supremacy too. The  anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells said Moody had "encouraged the drawing of the color line in the churches," the very last place it ought to exist. Frederick Douglass agreed. "Of all the forms of negro hate in this world," he declared in disgust, "save me from that one which clothes itself with the name of loving Jesus."

Moody prioritized national unity and racial hierarchy over Christian doctrine, perverting the good news he claimed to preach. Moody could not have been unaware of basic Christian teaching found in the Bible he loved. Christ had declared in no uncertain terms that he would enact eternal judgment on the basis of how his followers treated the most vulnerable and despised people in their society (Matthew 25). And his disciple John had bluntly warned that people who claimed to love God while hating human beings were liars (1 John 4). But Moody refused to apply the Gospel to his own country.

At the very end of his life, after his influence had waned, Moody finally stopped holding segregated revival meetings. But by then the damage had been done. And Moody had been overtaken in popularity by other preachers who were more overt in their commitment to White supremacy.[1]

We can trace a similar theme both forward and backward in time from Moody's position in the late nineteenth century. White evangelicals revere the profound theological reflections of the eighteenth-century minister and theologian Jonathan Edwards. We know much less about the people he enslaved.[2] White evangelicals have drawn inspiration from the astonishing zeal and oratory of the eighteenth-century evangelist George Whitefield. We know little about his lobbying efforts to institute slavery in the colony of Georgia.[3]

Moving forward in time, White evangelicals laud the most famous evangelist of the twentieth century, Billy Graham. If we know anything about his stance on racism, it is likely a triumphant narrative about how he desegregated his crusades (leaving aside the question of why they were segregated to begin with). Despite desegregating his crusades, Graham did not aid the civil rights movement. Worried that the movement threatened national unity and provided an opening for communism, Graham called for a more moderate course. When Martin Luther King wrote to Graham seeking his help in the battle against Jim Crow, Graham did not even respond. The task of brushing King's plea aside was left to one of Graham's lieutenants.[4]

White evangelicals do not generally know these stories. In this forgetting there is more than institutional protection and group bias at work. In the dominant White evangelical imagination, all these stories, if they are recalled at all, do not touch upon the essence of these men or their ministries. As long as these giants of the faith preached repentance and salvation through Christ alone, they can be heroes. This unchristian narrowing of theological vision allows the bonds of Whiteness and nationalism to go unexamined in many evangelical circles.

While White evangelicals venerate Moody and Whitefield and others, they erase from the story Christians who clung more faithfully to the Gospel. During these men's lifetimes fellow Christians were rebuking them for perverting the good news! These Christians believed, alike with Moody, that human beings are sinners in need of God's grace through Jesus Christ. But they also insisted on applying scripture to American society. We don't know the stories of those Christians or respect their theological insights because they were Black.

During my years at Moody, I'm not aware of having been assigned to read any theologian of color. Though my theological training was distinctly White in its cultural orientation and value system, and the campus culture strongly nationalistic, I was taught that what I was learning was simply biblical Christianity. This is perhaps the central conceit of my evangelical heritage: that a faith so bound up in modern categories of race and nationalism is somehow an unmediated expression of "true" Christianity rooted in the early church of 2,000 years ago.

This is the context in which we ought to read polls showing strong White evangelical support for Donald Trump. A new CBS poll has Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump 43% to 37% among all registered voters, while Trump leads among White evangelicals 62% to 17%.

Trump is running the most aggressively anti-Christian campaign of our lifetimes, with execrable displays of racism, contempt for women, and disregard for refugees. He shows no concern for the poor. He directs his venom against the very groups God, according to the Christian scriptures, chooses to identify with. And when it comes to protecting the lives of unborn children, Trump seems even less sincere than the usual degree of insincerity from GOP politicians.

Many White evangelicals are prepared to vote for Trump because they're heirs to a cultural and theological tradition that binds race and nation to faith. Trump may not offer a clean-cut portrait of Christian character, but he is surprisingly forthright in his White nationalism. It is a mistake to assume that Trump's irreligious persona doesn't carry a religious message. To make America great again, to restore America's racial hierarchy--these are religious goals of an idolatrous people.

Many White evangelicals are still under the impression that America is a new chosen nation, like the Israelites of old. They still don't know that the biblical narrative of the Exodus offers America a closer parallel: the blasphemous enslavers, the Egyptians. Many White evangelicals still haven't discovered that scripture is filled with God's constant claims that he identifies with those society despises. They still haven't realized that God's compassion for the oppressed and wrath for the oppressor is not a message of comfort to White, Christian America, but of judgment.

I know many White evangelicals who are too busy experiencing the grace of God in their daily lives to be enthralled by White nationalism. They are building health clinics, adopting children, running summer camps for poor children, raising scholarship funds to send students of color to college, working against gun violence, and living in poor communities as neighbors rather than gentrifiers. I know well all the good evangelicalism can do.

But we've seen, as well, the evil it can do when fused with political power and drained of the good news Jesus declared. In this extraordinary political season, I feel it is important to lay down a marker. The political "Christian right" is likely to follow Trump into the abyss. But many millions of Christians refuse to go there, and we insist that this so-called Christian political mobilization does not speak for us.

We claim that White nationalist Christianity is a perversion of the Gospel, and we invite everyone to receive the message of our savior, who came preaching liberation rather than hatred:

 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
    because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
    and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
    to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

_____________________
[1] My account of Moody relies on Edward J. Blum's excellent book, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press). See especially chapter 4. 

[2] See for example Richard A. Bailey, Race and Redemption in Puritan New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

[3] Jessica M. Parr, Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of a Religious Icon (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015). 

[4] Curtis J. Evans, "White Evangelical Responses to the Civil Rights Movement," The Harvard Theological Review 102 (2009): 245-273.

Donald Trump and the Crisis of White Identity

As Donald Trump has gone from a bad joke to a potential president, we need to think more seriously about the nature of his appeal. One school of thought says that White working class voters (more on this problematic label later) are supporting Trump because they have seen their economic prospects decline. Wages have stagnated for over a decade. Jobs were lost in the great recession that are never coming back. The hardship is real. But the way the media talks about Trump's supporters has the unintended effect of making excuses for White racism. Trump's followers have "economic anxiety" the pundits intone, as if this explains why they would find racism and bigotry appealing, as if economic setbacks are naturally greeted with cultural resentment and wild cheering for a mean-spirited demagogue. The unstated assumption is that when Whites face economic hardship much less severe than what people of color have faced decade upon decade, it is understandable--perhaps even reasonable!-- for them to lash out.

Measured by standards of White economic prosperity, Black Americans have faced an economic depression for...several centuries. Why have Black Americans failed to build large political movements in support of demagogues? Imagine a Black demagogue winning primary elections while calling Whites rapists, demanding a ban on White immigration, and excusing his supporters as they beat up White protesters. I ask you to seriously imagine it, because it's a revealing counterfactual. Would the media chalk it up to "economic anxiety" and "controversial" talk? The media framing of Trump's racism as a "tell it like it is brashness" reflects our basic familiarity and comfort with White racism. Trump doesn't necessarily strike fear into the heart of the White mainstream because it is not, after all, his target. And we who are White know this. We are in the majority. If Trump becomes president, we know we will not be in the firing line. Trump's supporters love him because he validates their Whiteness. Ironically, his detractors unconsciously draw on that same Whiteness as we fail to denounce him with the moral urgency his rise demands. 

To be clear, the economic anxiety narrative makes a lot of sense on its face. After all, the economic problems are real enough. Not only that, Trump has substantive differences with GOP orthodoxy that may draw voters to him. There are lots of Republicans who favor more protectionist trade policy, less immigration, and robust welfare programs for the elderly. Trump offers them this policy mix, while other Republican politicians traditionally do not. But it is irresponsible to discuss these factors without accounting for the crucial--indeed, decisive--way White identity intersects with and animates these issues. The economic anxiety narrative actually fails to explain what is most in need of explanation: why should stagnant wages make racism, bigotry, and plain mean-spiritedness more appealing? Many people, myself included, have marveled at the stickiness of Trump's support. It seems as though he can say almost anything and retain the allegiance of nearly a third of Republican voters. This is because Trump's campaign is at bottom an appeal to identity.

Characteristically conflating nationalism and White supremacy, Klan members march in the nation's capital. 1925.

What Trump's ascendance reveals, and the economic anxiety narrative fails to grapple with, is the underlying crisis of White American identity. Forged in conquest and enslavement of others, fortified in exclusionary campaigns for political, economic, and social supremacy, White identity retains implicitly many of the assumptions of its creation. Implicit in White identity is an entitlement to success. Yet many White Americans are not successful. And the oppression that created the entitlement is no longer socially acceptable. Even the currency of the "psychological wage" of Whiteness that Du Bois famously wrote about seems to have depreciated in value. For most of American history, even the poorest Whites could act out their sense of superiority over Black Americans, from the commonplace--calling a Black man "boy"--to the extraordinary spectacle of lynchings attended by thousands. In a post-civil rights movement society where equality and freedom for all is our publicly-avowed ethic, White identity is unmoored from its founding logic. Yet no coherent mass White identity has emerged to take its place. Perhaps more than ever before, we don't know how to understand a society where two things at once are true: Whiteness is advantaged, and millions of White people live in poverty and despair.

There are nineteen million poor White Americans, the census bureau estimates. Yet our popular media and cultural narratives have no room for them. We can't even talk about them. Poor Whites are "working class" or "blue collar." They are not poor. Why? Because to be poor is to contradict the basic narrative of Whiteness. To be poor and Black is to be a stereotype. To be poor and White is to be beneath one's (entitled) station. To be poor and White is to be ridiculed, yes; but more than that it is to be ignored altogether. When the anthropologist Kirby Moss launched a project to study poor Whites in a Midwestern city, people encountered him with surprise and confusion. Not only did they assume he would be White, they assumed that an anthropologist studying urban poverty must be studying Black people. Revealing, isn't it?

In his book, The Color of Class: Poor Whites and the Paradox of Privilege, Moss argued that poor whites are basically invisible in the public representation of Whiteness. They exist in an anomalous position: while their material lives are shaped by poverty, their identities are tied to Whiteness, which is not associated with poverty (except in certain specific tropes tied especially to the South and Appalachia). We desperately need a Whiteness that has room for them, a Whiteness in which success is not a birthright, where solidarity is more important than hierarchy, where poverty is not stigma, and where the self-serving fables of the rich are not accepted as sober economic analysis. In short, we need nothing less than the abolition of Whiteness as we have known it. Instead, the political mobilization around Donald Trump is encouraging Whites to double-down on our legacy of exclusionary political movements. It invites us to return to that great White myth: that success is a zero-sum game, that greater opportunities for others mean less opportunity for us.

We must be honest about the history by which we became White. The peoples who became White in the United States forged their collective identity in contexts of supremacy. One of our nation's first laws, the Naturalization Act of 1790, declared that only White persons could become naturalized as citizens. Whiteness became associated with so-called civilization, with manliness, with the ability to deploy the labor of others, to own land, to prosper, with American nationalism itself. Even if one did not own land or employ others, one could hope in the boundless potential of free White labor. According to civil war-era Republican ideology, the common (White) man would rise by the fruits of his labor, untainted by Black slavery. Southern White Democrats, demanding a Whiteness that used rather than excluded Black labor, fought back against Reconstruction with paramilitary violence and terrorism. Whites on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line came to believe that Reconstruction had been a disastrous experiment in Black empowerment. Driven in part by their shared commitment to White supremacy, they reconciled after the bitterness of civil war. The decades around the turn of the century saw Whites mobilizing in nativist campaigns against the mass immigration from Eastern Europe of people of questionable Whiteness. In the first decades of the twentieth century, White middle class progressives sought to remake the country in their image, offering assimilation for some and racist eugenics for others. In the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan was reborn as a national organization with millions of members. Mixing White supremacy, American nationalism, and Protestant Christianity the 1920s Klan exemplified the powerful conflation of Whiteness with other values that has characterized much of American history. White political movements have run the gamut from exclusionary to assimilationist. They have seldom been liberatory.

In contrast, the various peoples who became Black in the United States forged their collective identity in contexts of oppression. It was and is an identity characterized by narratives of resistance, resilience, and solidarity. We're all in this together. Even if these tropes operated at the level of myth more often than not, they became powerful tools of cultural and political mobilization. Black political movements have been rooted in the specific challenges African Americans face, but they have tended to promise enduring benefits to the entirety of America. From Reconstruction to the Great Migration, the civil rights struggle, and Black Lives Matter, movements grounded in the particular problems of Black Americans have offered visions of greater justice and opportunity for all Americans.*

The meanings of race, and the boundaries it imposes, have always been unstable. Whiteness has grown to encompass more groups and what it means to be White has continually changed. We are not doomed to endlessly repeat our legacy of exclusionary political movements. We can learn from the Black political tradition. And we can remember the minority of Whites at every historical moment who resisted the dominant investment in Whiteness in their time. As the meaning of race and racism transform once again in our own time, we have the opportunity and the responsibility to build a new Whiteness. As George Lipsitz has written, if we do not actively cultivate an anti-racist White identity, we will be consumed by our investment in a White identity that is inherently destructive.
____________

*Black nationalist and radical traditions, from Henry McNeal Turner to Marcus Garvey to Black Power, might at a glance seem to defy the narrative of an inclusive Black political tradition. But we must draw a sharp line of distinction between political mobilizations designed to oppress a minority group, and those minority groups' efforts to respond to their exclusion from the dominant society. Black nationalism has played an important and necessary role in resisting oppression.

People Are Right to Boycott the Oscars

Some Black artists have chosen to boycott the Oscars after the major award categories featured all-White nomination slates. It is not as though there was a deficit of great Black performances this year, and their exclusion from the awards stage is part of a broader decades-long pattern of discrimination. So the decision to boycott the event is entirely appropriate. But talk of a boycott is producing predictable hand-wringing and questions about the supposed threat to the integrity of the Oscars and of film artistry in general.

"What are the Oscars to do?
 Lower standards?
 Set an artificial quota for films featuring people of color?
 Are we to have affirmative action in movie awards now!!??
 Political correctness!!!!"

Implicit in these questions and complaints is the confident but completely unfounded belief that the Oscars reflect meritocratic achievement. The controversy brings into sharp focus the extent to which White success is coded in our society as earned and natural, even if there is little evidence to support these claims. It is hard to imagine that the people loudly insisting race has nothing to do with this would be so sanguine in a world where Oscar Voters were 94% Black. But here in our real world where they are 94% White, it is obviously inconsequential. By the way, there's nothing sinister or mysterious about this kind of discrimination. The notion that your identity will affect how you experience a film and identify with its characters is too obvious to be seriously denied. But this is, in effect, exactly what defenders of the Oscars do deny.

It is telling that so many people see a challenge to White dominance and Black exclusion as an attack on a meritocracy. Instead of appealing for inclusion of people of color using the language of individual achievement and hard-earned merit, we must expose how the fiction of meritocracy hides the reality of unearned White advantage.

Let's zoom out from movies and think about what we know of the broader structures of opportunity in American society: we know that Whites have race-based unearned advantages in getting jobs and promotions and benefit from network effects. We know that people of color, particularly African Americans, are widely discriminated against in the job market. We also know that discrimination and inequality in education, health, policing, and housing leave many young people of color less prepared for the job market in the first place. We know that these dynamics of unearned advantage and discrimination overwhelm the effects of affirmative action policies. Thus we know that, in the aggregate, successful White individuals are more likely to owe their success to their racial identities than are successful Black individuals. We know this. There's nothing mysterious about it. If we allow ourselves to linger on this point, we will see how dramatically the meritocratic screen distorts our perceptions.

Think about it: though successful Whites are the most likely to experience unearned advantaged based on race, their achievements are most associated with merit, hard work, and earned success. In contrast, achievements of people of color are associated with affirmative action and political correctness. The point is not that people of color never benefit from affirmative action; it is that whites continue to gain far more from our racialized society even as their success is coded as raceless. The idea of meritocracy is deployed in defense of the very group that least exemplifies it.

To be clear, I think it is uncharitable to view any person's success in cynical terms of earned or unearned. On an individual level, few people find great success without putting in a lot of hard work. But the suspicion that attaches itself to Black success ("he's only there because of affirmative action"), would, if applied with any consistency, render White success even more suspicious.

America: Where Property Rights > Human Rights

The right to private property is a decisive theme in American history. English colonists disparaged Native claims to land in part because such claims did not align with European conventions of property. Deeds to land, fences, European-style cultivation--all these signaled the arrival, so the English thought, of civilization itself. If the right to private property implied civilization, the right to a particular kind of property (in human beings) marked its owners as free people. In attempting to turn people into chattel, White Americans demonstrated in no uncertain terms the value they placed on private property, and the lengths they were willing to go to secure their own liberty, as they understood it. After the Civil War, property in people may have been (partially) abolished, but property in land remained as vital as ever. The federal government honored the land claims of former Confederates over the demands of freedpeople. Private property--even of those who made war against the state--was sacrosanct; the value of human lives less so. For the next century and beyond, the promise of the so-called American Dream was always, at bottom, a promise of property. It was a promise that people of color, seeking to claim, frequently found wanting. In a country where Whiteness itself became a kind of property, America's obsession with private ownership played out along hierarchical racial lines.

From a Christian perspective, private property in American history has been nothing short of an idol in the mosaic sense--a false god that leads the hearts of the people astray. The idolatry is all around us as we speak. Exclusionary zoning, gated communities, flight from public schools--all these hurt the poor, but serve the interests of property holders. The idolatry infects our moral reason too. I encountered a startling example of this reasoning in response to two recent news events.

David French, a writer at National Review magazine, has offered his take in recent days on the Tamir Rice grand jury decision and on the militia standoff in rural Oregon. You already know where this is headed, but let me share with you the title and an excerpt from the respective pieces. First, the Tamir Rice case: "The Grand Jury Made a Defensible Decision not to Indict in the Tamir Rice Case."

It was not the officers’ fault that they rolled up on the scene without that key piece of information [from the 911 call]. Thus, the officers were reasonably on a much higher state of alert. Then when Rice didn’t put his hands in the air despite shouted commands to do so — but instead seemed to reach into his waistband — their decision to open fire is rational, not criminal... 

[I]t’s difficult to second-guess a grand jury who sees no basis for subjecting those officers to a criminal trial.

Second, the Oregon militia: "The Case for Civil Disobedience in Oregon."

Deranged militiamen spoiling for a fight against the federal government make for good copy, but what if they’re right? What if the government viciously and unjustly prosecuted a rancher family so as to drive them from their land? Then protest, including civil disobedience, would be not just understandable but moral, and maybe even necessary... 

I sympathize with the ranchers’ fury, and I’m moved by the Hammonds’ plight. According to multiple accounts, they are good American citizens... 

They are victims of an all-too-common injustice. Ranchers and other landowners across the country find themselves chafing under the thumb of an indifferent and even oppressive federal government. Now is the time for peaceful protest. If it gets the public to pay attention, it won’t have been in vain.

(For the record, as far as I can tell the prison terms meted out to the Oregon ranchers are absurd and unjust. The Federal Government seems to be wrong here.)

The Oregon militia protest is more extreme and threatening (they're armed and occupying a federal building!) than any Black Lives Matter protest thus far. Its proximate cause is a convoluted property dispute. The stakes (of property) are much lower than those (of life) that stirred Black Lives Matter protests, yet the militia's tactics are more militant. Nonetheless French, a good law and order conservative, finds a way to sympathize with this militancy.

There are a lot variables at play in French's writing. He may be influenced by a sense of ideological and racial affinity, and both cases have heavy political overtones. The mistake is in thinking that any of these variables are fully separable from the American obsession with property. I'm not here to beat up on Mr. French. His thought is emblematic rather than exceptional. He represents an American tradition: the peculiar faith that ownership of private property is a supreme good, even if securing that property comes at the cost of human life.

For French, an overzealous enforcement of federal property protection laws is a grave injustice worthy of armed (but peaceful) civil disobedience. He is "moved" by the ranchers' sufferings and can "sympathize" with their anger. Landowners are at the mercy of an "indifferent" and "oppressive" federal government. But when state employees slaughter a twelve year old boy without practical warning and refuse to render medical aid (Notice French couldn't even be bothered to give an accurate accounting of the event), French serenely assures us that their behavior was "rational." The state has killed a twelve year old boy, but it would be "difficult" to second-guess a rigged grand jury process.

French's words of support for the ranchers are ten times more generous than anything he's been willing to concede in his many critiques of Black Lives Matter, and a hundred times more empathetic than the shallow dehumanization he offers for victims of state-sponsored murder. 

The engrained idolization of White property ownership allows writers like French to casually express dehumanizing racism and remain members in good standing of the respectable pundit class. And we enable it when we scrutinize every slip of the tongue and poorly-conceived joke ("Gasp! A racist! Get 'em!") but fail to probe the deeper idols and systems that implicate us all. What role does property play in my life? Do the righteous demands of my fellow human beings take precedence over my grasping desire to own, control, accumulate? Every battle over public housing in my neighborhood or tax increases for public schools compels me to consider whose interests come first. Every time I don't want to invite that person into my house again because last time they broke something, I'm grappling with the idolization of property over people. Every commute, every wary smile and mumbled "sorry" as I pass the homeless man on the corner, should impress on me these questions.

Christian Hope In A World of Injustice

In Minneapolis, protests continue over the police killing of Jamar Clark, an unarmed Black man police claim scuffled with officers but some witnesses claim was handcuffed when shot.

In Cleveland, citizens await the near-certain exoneration of Officer Timothy Loehmann, the murderer of Tamir Rice. Having upheld the principle that police officers are entitled to different grand jury proceedings than ordinary citizens, prosecutor Timothy McGinty's sympathies are clear.

In Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, the officer who killed Corey Jones after Jones' car broke down on the highway has been fired. His arrest is far from assured.

In Wilmington, Delaware, there are still few answers for why police shot and killed Jeremy McDole, a wheelchair-bound man in clear distress. The video looks damning. It is not known whether a serious investigation is being conducted.

In Chicago, people are on edge as they prepare for today's release of the video of the shooting of seventeen-year old boy Laquan McDonald. Officer Jesse Van Dyke shot him sixteen times. The city paid out a five million dollar settlement as part of its efforts to keep the video under wraps. Now a judge has ordered the city to release the video. In a remarkable "coincidence", Van Dyke will reportedly be charged with first degree murder today.

I'll stop there.

What are we supposed to do with this information? I'm not sure.

I've been thinking about the popular American notion of "the rule of law." We've all heard this. America is a nation of laws, we're told. We're governed not by the whims of people but by the dictates of law. This ideal is important, and it has made a material difference in the lives of millions of Americans. It has given us a standard to which we can appeal. It is also, in a more basic sense, an obvious fiction. From the founding of the country on stolen land and labor to Prosecutor McGinty's depraved behavior, we've operated by the dictates of cold and cruel power.

And it's worse than that. For injustice often comes not through flouting the law, but enforcing it. What are we to do when the law is not designed to do justice?  Prosecutor McGinty is not doing anything illegal. Nor did officer Loehmann when he shot Tamir, our legal system will soon declare. What are Black Americans to do when the law has never, and does not now, contain the protections necessary for full citizenship in a racist society?

One of the oddest characteristics of much American Christianity is that we don't think of our country as a place where oppression occurs in any serious way. We read in the Bible about oppression and injustice but we don't make the obvious connection. This is in part because so many American Christians are nationalists at heart. Nationalism is not a Christian value, but many have made it an integral part of their faith, bolstered by the false and offensive myth that this country is or ever was a Christian nation. Our failure to apply Christian notions of oppression to an American context also has a lot to do with our Whiteness. But many Christians are so invested in it they don't even know it's important to them. They just think it's "Christianity."

I've been thinking a lot about Tamir. We already know how this is going to go. The grand jury will decline to recommend charges. If by some miracle they do favor a lesser charge, he will not be convicted at trial. This is not fatalism. Remember, America is a place of oppression. I've been wondering what Tamir might have been thinking as he bled out on the ground. Did he wonder why no one was helping him? Was he conscious of his sister's screams as the officers tackled and handcuffed her? Was he hoping he would see his mom again?

And I've been thinking a lot about my childhood. To put it more precisely, I've been thinking not only about Tamir's murder, but about the likelihood that it was always going to be him and not me.

Tamir had a toy gun. The orange tip was off. From a distance, it looked real. I've been thinking about the toy gun my brother had. It shot little plastic BBs. It didn't have an orange tip in the first place. It was all black. Sleek. Looked like the real thing.

Tamir seemed to point his toy gun at some passersby.  I've been thinking about all the times my brothers and I must have pointed that gun at each other even though we were told not to. It was so cool. Looked so real. It was a fun game to play.

A man called the police about Tamir, but noted that the gun was probably fake. Tamir was in a public park across the street from his house. It was his front yard. I've been thinking about all the crazy stuff we did in our "public park," our expansive yard in rural Western Maryland. There was no one there to see us. No one called 911.

It's not hard to understand why Tamir, a Black boy, played with his toy gun in a public park in a decaying rust belt city with an oppressive police force while I, a White boy, played with mine in a bucolic rural setting where police were unknown. But people don't want to understand.

I know many people will seek to justify Tamir's murder, or at least soften the blow by noting, like the experts' reports, that the shooting was "lawful." As if what is legal has a good track record in American history. For Christians, such reasoning is an abdication of our responsibility. This is another oddity of American Christianity: many of us think we can have conventional White American opinions about racial issues and be faithful to Christ at the same time. We're deluding ourselves.

I've also been thinking back to the day a jury acquitted George Zimmerman. I remember how people defended him. Some of us, a little less entranced by racist tropes and pro-gun mania, had always regarded Zimmerman's poor character with relative certainty, a judgment that has been borne out in his subsequent behavior. Though I had not expected a conviction, the weight of the acquittal hit me with unexpected force. And I remember it very well, because I had what I guess I would describe as a nearly mystical experience. I did not feel self-righteous, looking down my nose in anger at the jury members or the people defending Zimmerman. I just felt an incredible sense of grief, a grief that encompassed not only everything outside me but everything within me as well. In other words, I lamented my own injustice. Yet at the same time, I felt a bizarre sense of closeness to God, as though the sadness I felt was a taste of what he feels in every moment. It was as though God himself pulled up a chair and said, "Here, Jesse, let me show you something."

I know this all sounds incredibly odd to those of you who have different beliefs. But there it is. And it brings me to what I suppose is my final point: Christian hope. What are we to do with the injustices above? One popular answer, masquerading as the Christian answer, is to emphasize the positive. Keep a good attitude! Stay positive! Look at that police officer hugging that cute child! That's often little more than an attempt to change the subject. Christian hope is something else. It allows us to face injustice without looking away. It allows us to fight it without despairing. And it allows us, as I knew for at least one night in my life, to stand against injustice without believing we're really any better than the evil we face.

There's a psalm that says, "I would have despaired unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living." That's not an opiate. That's strength to stay in the fight. Because we will see his goodness one day. American lawlessness will not have the last word. No American court will give the last word on the value of Tamir's life. 

Christian hope is the understanding that there is a place for the wrath of God, however archaic that concept sounds in our culture. We can fight injustice without giving in to vengeance and violence because we know that God will repay. I know this sounds naive to many who have different beliefs, and even to many Christians it is just an abstraction. But ask some Black Christians about it. They tend to know more than we do about Christian hope. 

The 59th chapter of Isaiah's prophecy presents an image of Yahweh as a warrior-God preparing for battle against injustice. I've shared it many times in the past few years, but it's worth sharing again.

The Lord looked and was displeased
    that there was no justice.
He saw that there was no one,
    he was appalled that there was no one to intervene;
so his own arm achieved salvation for him,
    and his own righteousness sustained him.
He put on righteousness as his breastplate,
    and the helmet of salvation on his head;
he put on the garments of vengeance
    and wrapped himself in zeal as in a cloak.
According to what they have done,
    so will he repay
wrath to his enemies
    and retribution to his foes;
    he will repay the islands their due.
From the west, people will fear the name of the Lord,
    and from the rising of the sun, they will revere his glory.
For he will come like a pent-up flood
    that the breath of the Lord drives along.

Don't Be A Clueless White Person

Before those of us who are White form any opinions about racial matters, it is useful to be aware of our majority status and our racial isolation. All of us are in the majority, and most of us are isolated, which is to say we spend most of our time in largely White contexts. Combining majority status with racial isolation is a recipe for ignorance and lack of empathy. The best solution is to simply change the very structures of our life so that we are less isolated. But many of us do not have the opportunity to do that in a substantial way. The good news is that there is a shortcut that should help us at least a little bit. So, I have a list of questions below to help us think about what it actually means to be a racial majority. If you're White, have opinions about race, but have not seriously meditated on these questions and others like them, you're in dangerous waters.

How often have you been the only White person in a room? How did you feel? Do you believe this affected your behavior or the behavior of others? (The latter two questions can be asked of each of the questions below).

How often have you been the only White person in a classroom?

How often have you been the only White person on your dorm floor?

How often have you received an important grade from a professor of a different race?

How often have you been the only White person in a place of worship?

How often have you received religious instruction from a person of a different race?

How often have you been the only White person in the room during a job interview?

How often have you received an employment evaluation from a supervisor of a different race?

How often has your loan application been decided by a person of a different race?

How often have you rented an apartment from a person of a different race?

How often have you sent your children to a school where most students were of a different race?

How often does the color of your skin make you stand out in your own neighborhood?

How often have most of the police officers in your town been of a different race?

How often have you been the only White person in a store?

How often have you been the only White person on a sports team?

You can think of your own questions too. Obviously, the point here is to think about what it's like to be a racial minority. But we're not done! Indeed, I haven't yet mentioned the most important part of this exercise. Consider this: even if you, as a White individual, leave your White world and answer "lots of times!" to all these questions, your experience will still be distinct from people of color. You'll still be living in a society where power operates along a racial hierarchy and stereotypes run in specific directions. Let me show you what I mean.

Alicia and I have been in many situations where our race really stood out. It can be uncomfortable. It can change the way others treat you. It can even change very concrete outcomes like employment and housing. But here's the thing: for Alicia and I, the stereotypes and assumptions are almost universally positive. People have assumed I am more competent than I am. They've assumed I'm wealthier than I am. They've assumed I'm not a criminal even when I matched the description! They've treated me with extra deference. All because of my race. Heck, our race appears to have been a factor in allowing us to secure our current house on favorable terms. For people of color, these assumptions work in exactly the opposite direction. They're alone in the room (literally or metaphorically) and instead of the positive stereotypes that have worked in my favor, they are often assumed to be less competent, poorer, criminal.

So don't be a clueless White person! Think about this. We shouldn't feel ashamed to admit that we are isolated and ignorant. Instead, we should be a lot more embarrassed to have opinions about things we haven't actually thought about.